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From: "hyatt@mozilla"
Subject: Priceless
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 15:27:41 -0000
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URL: http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/#85443744
Date: Not supplied
I just finished reading an article about Mozilla[1] for Salon.com[2]. This
excerpt was rather amusing.
_It is a good question, because in almost every way, Mozilla is a better
browser than Navigator. For example, Netscape's best new feature, tabbed
browsing -- which lets you have several Web pages open in the same browser
window, and allows you to bookmark all the pages under one name -- was in
Mozilla many months ago, and the Mozilla project that created it (called
MultiZilla) already has an improved version available. When asked about this,
Yecies, of Netscape, said, "That's true, but the engineer who's working on it
[for Mozilla] is a Netscape employee. It was always done with the intention of
fostering general browsing usability for Netscape."
_
Yes, ok, I suppose that's true if by "Netscape employee" you really meant
"Apple employee." and by "always done with the intention of fostering general
browsing usability for Netscape" you meant "was done in a weekend for Mozilla
because I thought MultiZilla was cool."
Here's how the whole tabbed browsing thing happened. One night I finally
downloaded an extension called MultiZilla (go check it out on mozdev.org[3]. I
was particularly impressed with a feature contained in MultiZilla called tabbed
browsing. I started doing research and discovered NetCaptor[4], a tabbed
browser that embedded WinIE.
MultiZilla was cool but at the time suffered from two fundamental flaws that
prevented the code from being incorporated into the Mozilla tree. The first was
a UI flaw, namely that at the time it had ripped off NetCaptor down to the last
context menu item. The GUI was similar enough that there would have been
definite concerns about so obviously copying some of NetCaptor's more obscure
capabilities (like sticky names and tab locking). The second concern was that
the tab behavior wasn't encapsulated cleanly into a widget.
I produced a simplified version of tabbed browsing on my own time (did it in a
weekend) that removed some of the geekier NetCaptor features and that
encapsulated the tab behavior so that the changes to other Navigator files
would be minimal. Once I established that it didn't degrade performance in the
single tab case, I checked it in as an experiment.
The response was overwhelming, as were the bugs that started being filed. So
much so that at first I wanted to back tabbed browsing out of the tree. I was
overruled by Mozilla, which turned out to be a good thing for all I think. :)
Even with all the excitement and hoopla surrounding the advent of tabbed
browsing on the engineering side (and in the Mozilla community), Netscape still
didn't get it. Netscape marketing prioritized all sorts of useless work that
nobody had even started above tabbed browsing in their marketing document. They
continued to do so for months, simply not getting it. It was this odd curiosity
that one of their engineers had checked in, and they didn't know what to make
of it.
Only after the press raved about it did Netscape really jump on board. I'm sure
Netscape is doing the same thing now with popup blocking. Can't you just see it
now? We'll have a Popup Manager, and a Manager to manage the Popup Manager, and
twenty-seven preferences for fine-grained control of all aspects of popups.
Can you believe how disfunctional Netscape is? When their engineers say "you
should do this" or "you should do that", they get completely ignored (or blown
off), but when CNet says "We didn't like this, or we didn't like that.",
Netscape scurries to meet their demands. That is simply pathetic.
[1] http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/09/10/browser_wars/
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3] http://www.mozdev.org
[4] http://www.netcaptor.com